Crucifix

Abstract

This painted wood crucifix , made sometime in the 1300s, is housed in San Francesco in Prato. This church was endowed with many works of art by Francesco Datini starting in 1383, but much of the work he commissioned has been since lost, when the building was radically restructured in later centuries. Datini is famous to scholars today as the Merchant of Prato, because his extensive archives survive, painting a vivid picture of life in the period. Datini commissioned wooden life-sized sculptures of mourners to flank this crucifix, and a "monticello" (literally small mountain, meaning a sculpted pile of rocks for the base of the cross), now lost. Photograph(s) licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.